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Ten Paradoxes of Technology/3 Techné 14:1 Winter 2010 Feenberg, Ten Paradoxes of Technology/3 Ten paradoxes of Technology Andrew Feenberg Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, School of Communication Simon Fraser University Note: This paper was presented at the 2009 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology as a keynote address. Abstract Though we may be competent at using many technologies, most of what we think we know about technology in general is false. Our error stems from the everyday conception of things as separate from each other and from us. In reality technologies belong to an interconnected network the nodes of which cannot exist independently qua technologies. What is more we tend to see technologies as quasi-natural objects, but they are just as much social as natural, just as much determined by the meanings we give them as by the causal laws that rule over their powers. The errors of common sense have political consequences in domains such as, development, medicine and environmental policy. In this paper I summarize many of the conclusions philosophy of technology has reached reflecting on the reality of our technological world. These conclusions appear as paradoxes judged from our everyday perspective. This paper presents a philosophy of technology. It draws on what we have learnt in the last 30 years as we abandoned old Heideggerian and positivist notions and faced the real world of technology. It turns out that most of our common sense ideas about technology are wrong. This is why I have put my ten propositions in the form of paradoxes, although I use the word loosely here to refer to the counter-intuitive nature of much of what we know about technology. 1. The paradox of the parts and the whole. Martin Heidegger, once asked whether birds fly because they have wings or have wings because they fly. The question seems silly but it offers an original point of entry for reflection on technology and development. Birds appear to be equipped with wings and it is this that explains their ability to fly. This is the obvious common sense answer to Heidegger's question. But this answer has implications that are less than obvious. Although our intuitions tell us birds belong in the air, our language seems to say that they are separate from the environment on which they act and even separate from the "equipment" they use to cope with that environment. Birds use wings to fly in something like the way in which we humans use airplanes. Pursuing the analogy we could say that if birds did not have wings they would be just as earthbound as were humans before the Wright brothers—or was it Santos Dumont? —invented the airplane. But this makes no sense. Although there are a few species of flightless birds, most birds could not survive without flying. Flying is not just something birds do; it is their very being. A better analogy to birds' flight would be human speech. Although speechless humans do exist, they lack an essential aspect of what it is to be human. Speech is not properly understood as a tool humans use to communicate because without it they are not fully human. Speech, like flight for Techné 14:1 Winter 2010 Feenberg, Ten Paradoxes of Technology/4 birds, is essential in a way tools are not. One can pick up and put down a tool, but humans can no more abandon speech than birds can abandon flight. Pushed to the extreme the common sense answer to Heidegger's puzzling question breaks down. Of course we usually do not fall into such absurdities when talking about animals, but the misleading implications of ordinary language do reflect our inadequate common sense understanding of technology. This has consequences I will discuss in the rest of this paper. Heidegger's second option, that birds have wings because they fly, challenges us in a different way. It seems absurd on the face of it. How can birds fly unless they have wings? So flying cannot be the cause of wings unless an effect can precede a cause. If we are going to make any sense of Heidegger's point we need to reformulate it in less paradoxical language. Here is what he really means. Birds belong to a specific niche in the environment. That niche consists of treetops in which to dwell, insects to eat, and so on. It is only available to a specific type of animal with a specific type of body. Flying, as a necessary property of an organism that occupies this particular niche, requires wings rather than the other way around as common sense would have it. This is a holistic conception of the relation of the animal to its environment. We are not to think of birds, insects and trees as fully separate things but rather as forming a system in which each relates essentially to the other. But this is not an organic whole the parts of which are so intimately connected they can only be separated by destroying the organism. In the case of an animal and its niche, separation is possible at least temporarily, although it threatens the survival of the animal and perhaps of other elements of the environment dependent on it. These relationships are bit like those of a part of a machine to the whole machine. The part can be separated from the whole but it then loses its function. A tire that has been removed from a car continues to be a tire but it cannot do the things tires are meant to do. Following Heidegger's thought, it is easy to see that the form and even the existence of tires such as we know them depends on the whole car they are destined to serve. And the reciprocal also holds: care and tire are mutually interdependent. The car is not just assembled from pre-existing parts since the nature of the parts is derived from the design of the car and vice versa. The car does not ride on the road because it has tires. Rather, the tires belong to the car because the car rides on the road. I will call this the paradox of the parts and the whole. The apparent origin of complex wholes lies in their parts but, paradoxical though it seems, in reality the parts find their origin in the whole to which they belong. I want to illustrate this paradox with two images, each of which exemplifies the two answers to Heidegger’s question in graphic terms. Techné 14:1 Winter 2010 Feenberg, Ten Paradoxes of Technology/5 The first of these images shows a carburetor in a manufacturer’s catalog. As you can see it is a wonder of sharp edged surfaces and smooth curves in cold, shiny steel. It is completely separate from its environment and fulfills the dream of reason, the dream of pure order. Now look at this second image by the painter Walter Murch. We are once again in the presence of a carburetor, but this time it is portrayed as a warm and fuzzy object that blurs into the air around it. It is compared subtly with a sprouting onion over to the left which establishes a scale that contradicts its strangely monumental aspect. This is a romantic rather than a rationalistic image. It hints at the history and the connectedness of the thing rather than emphasizing its engineering perfection. Which image is truer to life? I prefer Murch’s which I used as cover art for a book called Questioning Technology (1999). Murch sets us thinking about technology’s complexity, the environment in which it functions, the history out of which it arises, rather than answering the question in advance with a nod to its supposedly pure rationality. Examples that confirm the point are easy to find. A technology imported or imitated from a developed country is implanted in a new environment in a less developed country. It is expected that it will perform in the same way everywhere, that it is not a local phenomenon bound to a particular history and environment. In this respect technologies differ from such rooted phenomena as customs or language. Difficult though it be to transfer Western industrial technology to a poor country, it is far easier than importing such things as a different cuisine or different relations between men and women or a different language. So we say that technology is universal in contrast to these particular and local features. And this is usually correct to a considerable extent. Of course it makes no sense to send tractors to farmers who have no access to gasoline. Such gross mistakes are occasionally made but for the most part the problems are more subtle and are often overlooked for a long time. For example, industrial pollutants that were evacuated safely by a good sewage system in a rich country may poison wells in a new, much poorer, locale. Differences in culture too pose problems. The keyboards of the typewriters and computers Japan imported from the West could not represent its written language. Before a technical adaptation was found some Japanese concluded that Techné 14:1 Winter 2010 Feenberg, Ten Paradoxes of Technology/6 modernization would require the adoption of English! Good sewage systems and Roman alphabets form a niche essential to the proper functioning of these technologies just like the water in which fish swim. Technologies resemble animals in belonging to a specific niche in a specific society. They do not work well, if at all, outside that context. But the fact that technologies can be detached from their appropriate niche means they can be imported without bringing along all the contextual elements necessary for their proper functioning.
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